After about almost a year of development, the much improved and expanded Facebook like button, Facebook Reactions, is finally coming to your news feed.
For the first time, you’ll be able to react to friends’ posts with something other than a gesture of pure positivity. Long press on the Like button and you’ll now see “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry,” and posts will now show the mix of reactions they’ve received.
However, Facebook has decided to skip on the dislike button which was requested by some users. The company also mentioned that the addition of the feature rich button has proven popular with users during testing in Spain and Ireland. The gimmick is making its way today on iOS, Android, and the web.
“Everyone’s had one of these posts in News Feed where they’re like, I want to respond in some way, but ‘like’ doesn’t feel appropriate at all,” says Tom Alison, director of engineering for the News Feed. “It was really important to us that this was something that could be universal,” he added.
Facebook came up with different parts of the button by looking at and analysing the one word comments or emoticons that people used to leave on their friend’s post.
Initial testing in Spain and Ireland led to two reactions being trimmed from the initial list: “yay” and “confused.” Though, in both cases, the people who used the emoticon once were most likely to use it again.
To access the different parts of the like button, you will have to long press it, however, on the web application, just hovering over the button will show you the different options.
These options will be available on both individual and business pages, so, you can react to an ad on your news feed the way you like, but do keep in mind that Facebook will be monitoring the reactions closely to prevent any possible misuse.